Earlier this year, Mint Mobile made an appeal to the National Advertising Review Board as a way of defending its decision to use “unlimited” in its advertising. The T-Mobile MVNO appealed the use of this word since their unlimited prepaid plan comes with 35GB of high-speed data per month.
The other carriers and MVNOs are also known to offer a cap on their high-speed data. Unfortunately, Mint Mobile slows down the data speeds of its customers to an unreasonably slow 2G speed once the allotted 35GB of data is consumed. Because of this, the NARB has decided to side with AT&T’s argument that Mint Mobile’s data is slower than what customers can expect.
One key point as to why the term unlimited shouldn’t be used by Mint Mobile is because they reduce the speed to very slow 2G once the threshold is reached. Other carriers may offer less than 35GB of data per month, but they only reduce the speed when the network is congested. And in most cases, these customers are dropped to a more reasonable speed that is closer to 3G.
With the new decision, Mint says that it will comply with the board’s recommendation. They will either “discontinue or modify” its unlimited claim.
Source: The Verge
